“Holding her is fine,” he said. “Just keep her leads on.” The leads were the only link between her interior and us. If anything went wrong, the leads would let us know.
But no alarms sounded; her cotton ball heart beat happily on, un-overwhelmed, filling with the blood of an anonymous stranger. Gracie was surviving, literally, on the kindness of strangers. This was stranger number two. I tried to fathom who these people keeping her alive might be. Winos in need of a buck? Handsome good Samaritans dropping by the blood bank on the way home from Google? Soccer moms with spare time? Whoever they were, I wanted to make out with them. Just for a minute or two.
The next day we were allowed to go home. Crossing the parking lot, I broke into a run.
At home she was a brand-new girl. She stayed up for hours at a stretch, looking at me, looking at Lulu, looking at the mysterious objects, unseen by me, that she saw in the middle distance. She was pink. Not yellow. Pink! She gurgled and cooed and swished her hands through the air. She cried. She was a proper baby, at last. A baby with enough blood, oxygen, and energy to make her needs loudly known.
“Baby,” I told her as she nursed with force, “you are an Olympic nurser!”
Later Brian called. “We’re home!” I said by way of answering. “Beautiful news,” he replied. We’d begun to share an esoteric tongue made of medical jargon and new-parentese. “Is she still doing the toe bendy thing?” he’d ask, or “Have they mentioned an arterial access as a way to get in?” I could feel his worry, his attention, the force of his care beaming toward us. I fed him vocabulary from the doctor, and he spent hours on the Internet, looking things up, comparing medical sites, taking a crash course in transfusion medicine. Trying to figure out what the hell was wrong with her and how we could help her hang on to every one of her red cells.
I pictured Brian as Captain Kirk from Star Trek (for whom Brian, intellectual though he was, harbored an adorable, abiding regard). It felt as if he was returning via transporter, from a long journey, rematerializing in our lives, particle by particle.
8
The whole studio smelled like Nepal. Suzi was cooking a Nepali dinner for us. She’d made the basic—dal bhat (lentils and rice)—plus tarqadi (veggies) and aloo ko achar (potato relish). Aloo ko achar was my favorite, boiled potatoes covered in sesame seed paste with lime and chili and salt ground in. It was almost impossible to make the way we’d had it in Nepal when we’d lived there together. But Suzi, when she puts her mind to a particular project, is unstoppable. She once applied a faux finish of “fleck stone” to aging countertops and gross appliances throughout an entire kitchen, one spray can at a time.
I dipped in the edge of a spoon. “It looks legit, Suz. Yum.”
“I know, right?” She smiled.
The three of us, Suzi and David and I, spent almost a year in Nepal together as college students at World College West—a tiny liberal arts college founded on the belief that all students should, by graduation, understand themselves to be citizens of the world.
World College West required you to pick a developing nation in which to spend your junior year. The choices were China, Mexico, the former Soviet Union, or Nepal. All the students coming back from China said it was freezing in the dorms and that they ate meat of indeterminate origin, three meals a day. The Soviet Union sounded too … forbidding. And Mexico was somewhere we could go on our own, later. So, Suzi and David and I all picked Nepal, a lifelong happiness choice. And David came home as Dawa, his Nepali name, which we’d called him ever since.
Even now, ten years later, we often spoke Nepali to each other for fun or discretion or just because we could. Sometimes I dreamt in Nepali, speaking like a five-year-old. Nepali has a great sound, lyrical, rhythmic, and full of onomatopoeia. Rungi chungi means “colorful.” Geeli meeli means “bright and sparkly.” We were charmed by the entire country. Its physical beauty, the green terraced rice fields under the white peaks of the Himalayas; its cultural richness. There was a festival nearly every week, often complete with a festival princess clad in red silks, paraded above the celebrants’ heads on a hand-carried wooden dais. Nepalis were, hands down and on the whole, the nicest people I’d ever encountered. If you spoke a few broken sentences of Nepali to a shopkeeper, the next thing you knew they’d be offering you milky, sweet tea.
Suzi and David and I longed for Nepal, and to make Nepali food was always an act of comfort-giving.
Suzi and I sat on the couch with Gracie tucked between us and tried not to spill spicy food on her as we ferried it to our mouths. After dinner I said, “Dawa, will you get us some New York Super Chocolate Fudge Chunk?” And off he went to the store, always ready for a mini-adventure.
Suzi and I sat in silence; we each rested one fingertip on the baby’s stomach as it rose and fell.
“She’s your child,” Suzi said. “You have a child.”
We’d known each other since we were nineteen and twenty-one. Since we stood in the corner at parties and gossiped, since we hitchhiked from San Diego to the tip of Baja and somehow survived, since we wondered whether or not to take Ecstasy with our assorted boyfriends.
“I guess we’re grown-ups,” I said.
“Do you talk to Brian?”
I hesitated. When it came to Brian, Suzi was not, at present, a fan. “Yeah,” I said, “but never about us, just her. He takes a lot of notes. He looks stuff up.”
“He takes notes?”
“He researches things I tell him. Like when I said the baby screamed when they placed the IV, he looked up pain reduction in infancy. Sugar helps, apparently. But how do you give an infant sugar? He’s fretting about her.”
“From afar.”
I didn’t tell Suzi that our conversations were often laced with wide, impenetrable silences. Places where we each refrained from saying anything, for fear of saying something incendiary.
After dessert we watched a movie. Something with guns, muscle cars, and explosions. I fell asleep with my feet on Dawa’s lap and my head on Suzi’s shoulder. The baby was asleep on top of me, and neither of them wanted to wake us. Lulu stayed on the cool tiles. When the movie ended the quiet woke me.